Blank Check with Griffin & David - Back to the Future Part II with Nicole Byer

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

Man wouldn't it be weird to have a future controlled by a rich blond bully who hates women, steals things and is awful to everyone? Robert Zemeckis predicts a wild, kooky, and somewhat accurate 2015 with Back to the Future Part II. Comedian Nicole Byer (Nailed It, Newcomers, Why Won't You Date Me) helps us make sense of the different timelines, unpack the connection to Trump, analyze the film’s strategic approach to the sequel and the ultimate disappointment that hoverboards continue to not exist. Subscribe to our patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod onTwitter and Instagram Merch is available at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

so there i was minding my own business This crazy old codger with a cane shows up, says he's my distant relative. I don't see any resemblance. So he says, how would you like to be rich? So I said, sure. So he lays this podcast on me. He says, this podcast will tell me the outcome of every sporting event till the end of the century. All I have to do is bet on the winner and I'll never lose. So I say, what's the catch?

He says, no catch. Just keep it a secret. After that, he disappeared. I never saw him again. Oh, and he told me one more thing. He said, someday, some crazy, wild-eyed kid and a six-foot-one man who grew up in England might show up asking about that podcast.

And if that ever happens... Funny. I never thought it'd be blank check griffin i am six three i just want to say god damn it i just want to make that clear i am six two he said i was six one which is fine i'm not worried about my height cares so much about the inches in a height yes i don't care look i feel like there's no situation there and i appreciate i understand where you're but no no there's i'm not insinuating anything i truly don't understand why men are like no i'm not 7 11 i'm 6 step 6 foot i don't get it here's the other thing i like i think i'm 6 3 When's the last time I got measured by height?

Probably when I was 16 years old. Yeah, thank you. I don't know how tall I am anymore. You don't have physicals every year? I do not. I mean, I guess I go to the doctor. I just feel like they never measure my... They measure you.

All right. Well, maybe they do. And I'm still 6'3". No, they do. They measure you. He's too tall. The doctor can't reach the top of his head. He's too tall. They just shrug reach the top of his head he's too

tall they just shrug and give up also if my future self you're six three i said six you said six one i'm six three it's fine i don't care sorry do you have a really don't care yes you do we've been talking about it for uh two minutes do you have like a a measuring tape yeah i mean i do somewhere do you know if it's easily accessible tape yourself tape yourself quickly because we can end this right here right now we can settle this nicole i'm so happy we're doing this what were you about to say about your future told me that i had to listen oh it's so readily available uh my future is right around the corner if my future self told me i had to listen to a podcast to get rich i wouldn't do it i don't listen to podcasts i find them mind

numbing because it's a conversation that like i'm not part of you just want to be yeah because i love talking but my very approximate solo measure puts me at six two2". So I don't know where that leaves us. Probably 6'1". Oh, interesting. Actually, probably 6'1". Maybe I had it right the first time. But here's the thing as well. I'm probably like 5'11", because I slouch so much. And the doctor's the one

making you stand up straight against the wall. I'm not 6'3". I don't present as 6'3". See, David, now I'm worried that you're 6'3 slouching, and the next time you go to the doctor, you're going to stand up straight and turn out to be 6'8". All I know is they made me play basketball when I was a little kid because I was so tall.

Who's they? And I was so bad at it. Like, you know, my parents, I don't know, gym teachers, they were always like, well, you're so tall, you'll be good at this. And, you know, I don't have any hand-eye coordination. And I, much like michael j fox will look like a tiny boy for the entirety of my life that's good you look great i mean i think it's good because you're also aging well so you don't look like an old baby you just look like a spry young man nicole i feel like i'm heading towards old baby i do i look in the mirror and i get i get worried about being a wrinkled Benjamin Button baby in five years.

Not yet. I think you'll have to. Actually, you might not ever have to worry about it. Like, look at Leslie Jordan. He just looks like a cute little old man, not an old baby. And he's very tiny. I mean, that's a dream. That's, I hope I end up like Leslie Jordan.

That's best case scenario. Leslie Jordan's just going to cash those cute old man checks for another, what, 30 years? He's so cute. I love him so much. He's very adorable. He's so cute. I'm realizing what I now want to see is like a variety special hosted by Leslie Jordan and Baby Yoda. Like, I want to see a Baby Yoda, Leslie Jordan double act doing like skits and songs and dances.

Right? I can kind of get into it but like i don't know how i feel about baby yoda in a variety special also i have very little interaction with baby yoda that having been said the last time we were on a podcast together we talked baby yoda yes i have not watched any more episodes right but Beria Right, but yeah, he could get sort of David Pumpkin-y So you've only seen those first three Right, you were right, you tapped out at three Yeah

But I have a counterpoint, Nicole Your favorite Star Wars movie is the Star Wars Holiday Special Oh my god, it's so good I love it I've seen it twice now Right So that's what I'm pitching I'm pitching like a leslie jordan

baby yoda christmas i'm picturing that okay you know i'm on board now i wasn't on board but now i am and they're like they're like penn and teller like baby yoda still remains a silent act you know we're not gonna have him speaking yapping about leslie jordan's doing all the talking okay and baby yoda is just there Giving you energy Picking up objects, drinking tea But I worry because Kacey Musgraves Or Musgroves

Or Mus-something She's a country singer She had a Christmas special And it was not okay It was not for me It was like bad I don't want to say it's bad Because several people were involved,

maybe hundreds. I don't know. A lot of people tried really hard to make it good, but like I watched it and I was like, I don't know. I don't know if anyone tried hard enough. It was just like weird and, and strange.

And the line reads were insane. The director must've been napping the whole time. I don't know. It was just so, you have to watch it. I don't want to be rude, but it was not for me. I'm seeing that James Corden swung by. I'm looking at the guest list here.

Kendall Jenner was there. Yeah, who knows why? Lana Del Rey. Wow. Yeah, it was like a lot of people, but then it wasn't very cohesive. Some of the sets were really cute. I don't know. I just think it was a real miss.

I sound like a bitch. What? I have two questions. Hell yeah, dude. Question number one is, I wonder if these things just need to be on network television. Like, to some degree, a holiday special needs to have copious network. Yeah, maybe. You know?

Maybe. Two, did. You know? Maybe. Two, did they get Valanche in the writer's room? Like that might be the whole problem right there. That he's involved or that he's not involved? That he's not involved. If you're making a Christmas special, you gotta get Bruce. I agree, and I don't think he was involved. I don't think he was, no.

I don't know what Valanche is doing these days. Griffin, can you introduce our show? Yes, get him in a room with Baby Yoda and Leslie Jordan. Thus concludes our section. Do a Christmas special with Leslie Jordan and Baby Yoda. Hello, everybody. And welcome to Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin.

I'm David. And this is the podcast Old Biff warned you about. It's a podcast about filmographies. Directors who have massive success early on in their career are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, and sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce baby. And this is a miniseries on the films of Robert

Zemeckis. It's called Podcast Away, and today we are talking about Back to the Future 2, which is one of his first big check cashings. Sure. One could say, right?

Sure, absolutely. Roger Rabbit is him doing the like, right, but he was like, that's a blank check where he did something so wild and ambitious

that there was a big chance that he could have failed and really embarrassed himself in the process. This movie is him playing with house money. Like, going back and saying, I'm going to do Back to the Future 2,

he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. Nicole. No. You specifically picked this movie, right? When we were asking you to come on. Yeah. Like, this is your Back to the Future movie. This is your Zemeckis movie, right?

Well, Back to the Future 1 is my Zemeckis movie. Well, sure. But I enjoy Back to the future movie this is your zemeckis well back to the future one is my zemeckis movie well but i enjoy back to the future too okay and i don't love back to the future three but if it's on tv i will not turn it off okay so all three really check the box it's like yeah the first one though really i truly. I've seen it hundreds of times. Agree. Well, our guest today is Nicole Byer, recent Emmy not winner. Hell yeah, dude. She didn't win it.

But I didn't realize this. You hosted all four nights of the Creative Arts Emmys. Sure did. Which was my first indication that I was not going to win the Emmy. Oh, you think they're like, well, they know, like, okay, indication that I was not going to win the Emmy. Oh, you think they're like, well, they know, like, OK, well, there's not going to be an awkward moment where the host wins. Absolutely. Absolutely. I was like, all right, I'll take your money as opposed to a statue. I was like pestering you all of last week to try to get a record time down because of our stupid podcast having this very set schedule of the order we need to do episodes in and then i realized only after the fact oh i was pestering

you while you were hosting four successive nights of an award show it's okay i apologize i apologize for that nicole it's okay honestly i shot it all in one night, but then a lot of productions have started up at the same time, so people want table reads and recording. It's been really wild. Are you still, like, how are you? Yes, thank you for doing this. Oh, yeah! How are you navigating stuff at home versus stuff that you have to show up and go someplace to do? What is your attitude on that? Because I know a couple weeks ago I was talking with you about that. Uh-huh.

And you were like, I'm afraid of outdoors and other people. I was afraid of outdoors and people. But now you better let me do a voiceover at a studio. I don't want you dropping off shit at my house that I have to set up and then shove back in a suitcase. And I don't know how to do that. And then the Wi-Fi connection is not great. And then the Zoom clunks out. No, send me to a studio where there's nobody else there or maybe like one other person where everything's wiped down. I bring my own little hand sanny.

I like that. When there's like a lot of people, that gets scary. Like I've been doing a lot of COVID tests at the lot. And that's a little frightening because there's a ton of people there. But like everyone's scared of each other. Sure. So everyone's just. So it's kind of insane.

You like eyes get wide when you get too close. You're like, we're not in the same production. It's a wild time to be alive. The voiceover stuff I love because you're in like a plexiglass Hannibal Lecter cage. Like you feel even safer in some ways than you do at home. But the second I'm in a room with another person, I start to freak out. Yeah, yeah. It's all fair.

So Back to the Future, a big franchise for you. It's one of my ultimate franchises, Nicole. David was saying when we recorded our back to the future episode and i was very much on one talking about how perfect that movie is that like he likes back to the future but it's not one of his big franchises that's crazy how do you not love back to the future i do love it i just feel like I've seen it, whatever, four or five times. That's it? For some reason, it was never in my constant rotation.

That's so crazy to me. I think it's a perfect movie. Deeply flawed, but a perfect movie. That's the weird magic of it. You're like, this movie's weird. And yet, everything makes sense and works and feels very satisfying. Lorraine has no real storyline, except she's going to dodge sexual assault the whole movie.

There's four attempts to assault her in a two-hour movie. And also she's thirsty for her son. Thirsty for her son on me. Yes, and she's thirsty for his... Yeah, it's a wild movie but like i wouldn't change a thing no there was that thing going around twitter however long ago of like name four perfect movies and back to the future is such a good example of a movie you can say is perfect but also can criticize deeply but it's just like fundamentally in conversation

with itself it works so perfectly. Yeah, it really does. Because you can explain away a lot of it. Like the sexual assault. Sure. It was the 50s. People were poorly behaved. Right.

She's got the hots for her son. How the fuck is she supposed to know that this little cutie who came to town is her son? And he's cute. Not her fault. He's a little cutie. And he's got megawatt charisma. Yeah. And he's got he's got 80s energy. He little cutie. And he's got megawatt charisma. Yeah, and he's got 80s energy. He's got like a...

And then he saves her from assaults. But then he plans to assault her. You know, it's a fun movie. But then her future husband actually saves her from assault. Yes. Mm-hmm. It is funny at the end of the movie when she's like, help, help!

And that redhead is like dragging her away. And you're like, man, she's overreacting. As a that's what i thought as an adult i was like no this is the fourth attempt and she's just like no not again she's had a horrible week yeah now david david has like griffin on record you're trying to turn me into the villain you're upset okay go ahead go ahead no that like you were never very hot on Back to the Future 2, that it was really just the first one for you. And I feel like you do, Nicole, where I'm like, the first one is perfect,

but this, like, 2 was kind of my movie in terms of my excitement hitting. It is wild. It's so fun and wild and creative and such a bug nuts approach to making a sequel that i just think as a kid i get so excited watching it because i'm like i can't believe they're doing this even though no one is better the ambition of two two is very ambitious also as a kid i was like i can't wait for 2015 and then 2015. We didn't fucking get flying cars.

No, there was no hoverboard. No magic bend over to tie my fucking shoelaces. Mad about it. Uh, yeah. It's also one of those things where like everyone had the checklist. I feel like of like run, run 2015 against back to the future. 2015. What don't we have?

What's failed to come true? This sucks. The future is awful. And now I'm like, all I want is to go back to 2015. 2015 sounds fucking rad. We didn't know how good we had it. Yeah, 2015 was a nice year. Our last year of Obama before we got our own Biff Tanner,

or Tannen, as a president. Right. America had a properly set up pandemic task response team. Yeah. You know, it's bad. But you know what? I think things are going to pick up in October. Please don't ask me why October because my theory doesn't really make sense when I say it out loud.

Wait, you think in one week. But this episode week come out in like two or three right like it's just gonna start turning around because i love that theory i think it's gonna be great i think the back end of this year for everybody's gonna be real nice i mean i love that theory i'm i'm actually kind of all in in that theory like what else am i gonna do think it's gonna be worse like what's that doing for me start thinking good thoughts for uh for october and it's gonna happen we have to have magical thinking right i think that's a book i read uh sure joan didion yes joan didion right um yes back to the future too Griffin Yes Go ahead I want to hear I don't want to make you into too much of a heel I don't want to present you too much as the Biff

I want to hear your history with this movie I remember when I was watching it Again I have not seen it that many times I've still seen it a few times I remember once being at a sleepover Where we watched it twice That's a nice sleepover I sleepover where we watched it twice. Ooh! That's a nice sleepover.

I know. I think we watched it twice because, like, it was kind of fun the second time. We must have been 10 or 11 years old, like, to puzzle it out better. You know what I mean? Like, the first time, it's sort of overwhelming. The second time, you can better see how it all fits together. I remember that i remember being very upset that biff just i was very upset by biff biff really like disturbed me when i was a kid

yeah he's bad he is bad really bad no good um and he yeah sure he disturbs me now but now i kind of appreciate that like i love that performance i think thomas wilson's really funny in this movie like he's kind of the it's okay he's kind of the mvp of this one for me is that a wild opinion that's not a wild opinion right no i think i think he is yeah i don't think it's a wild opinion you think that's a that fully wild opinion because i like i think it's not oh okay good okay because griff what he's doing with griff is is weird like weird. Everyone else is kind of doing very... Griff is a whole new take on... I guess he's still aggro.

He's still aggro, but he's weird aggro, and I appreciate it. I appreciate that performance more than Michael J. Fox's performance as his son. His son was too dopey. I was like, what is wrong with you? Really dopey his son his son was too dopey i was like what is wrong with you really dopey really dopey i forgot how dopey he was yeah and he's just like oh dad my sleeves are too long like he's walking down the street like he's never seen a street or people before he's the most clueless kid who's ever lived yeah but i do love i love back to the future so much and it does have i like that it has that weird kind of heart to it and i like that it has that whole take that

you're talking about nicole where which i went on about in our last episode that like the 50s were far seedier and nastier than you know you might? Like, I feel like that's a lot of what that movie's about. This movie, I think, is all, you know, it's bananas. It's a Rube Goldberg machine where all this crazy stuff is lining up in all this fun way. But I don't know what I'm rooting for in this movie, except for them to just unfuck all the mistakes they made, right? Like, what's this movie like? You know, who am I sort of who who do i

love in this movie are you kidding okay well marty and doc well they're great i love those two people to ever live that's who you're rooting for you're rooting for marty from 1985 and doc from 1985 they're they're great people i think they're super cool but basically they like make a crazy mistake they have to fix it and they fix it and it's great it's fun well marty just makes the mistake right doc actually brings him to the future to be like your dopey ass son gets in trouble let's try to like not get this idiot in trouble so they do that and then the almanac like that's marty being a little selfish and showing that he is a flawed hero i would have that fantasy too if i was marty i sympathize with that i would i would i would think about that has gone on and on and on about

you can't know too much about your future and you know it's not for personal gain it's purely just to be like oh boy we're on safari it's a gambler though right that's not for personal gain it's purely just to be like oh boy we're on safari it's a gambler though right that's what it comes down to i do like to gamble it's got that he's got the bug i do like to gamble but you know it's do you like slots i don't love slots i'm more of like uh i like like poker and craps and you know like table i like the social like weirdness of like casino. Whereas I'm a video slots guy. You are? Last time I was in Vegas,

I was blacked out sitting at a slot machine, just like hitting the button. And I looked at my friend and I was like, that's how that gets you to just keep playing. You keep playing, you keep hitting the button. And then a man walked by and went, you didn't put any money in.

It was on like demo mode. Never laughed harder. It was just like the example mode where like it just kind of goes. So then I was just hitting the button. There's only two ways that story was going to end. That's actually the best way to gamble. Right. It was either going to end with you not having put money in or you winning

a million dollars no can't win anything if you didn't put nothing in that's true with a planet fitness block card you don't just get a great workout you get a great perk out because your membership is packed with perks for zero down and 29.99 a month you'll get perks like access to any of our 2400 clean and spacious locations bring a friend anytime and both work See, this is my whole thing. You asked David in the last episode, why do you think this franchise resonated with you so much as a kid? Because I care about Back to the Future at large beyond just the first movie. And I was like thinking about it because I didn't have an answer at the time.

And I think the things that really resonate with me are that it is such a character based franchise most of the other major movie franchises are so much about the universe the lore the sort of like alternate reality a lot of the stuff that you cover on newcomers nicole is like the types of franchises like star wars and lord of the rings that you've always been somewhat resistant to where you're like, I don't want to learn a language and a bunch of different species and a different timeline or a different alternate universe

or planet or whatever. And I'm a dork and I like that stuff. But Back to the Future feels pretty unique to me in that it is so much a franchise about these characters and the relationships between them and that it's about the ripple effects of the decisions that they make like all the travels they do all the wild things that happen

are so much defined by those little decisions you know can i things like marty buying the almanac yes so paul rust you know paul rust he's a comic. He's an actor. He's really fun. We love Paul Rust. So we were talking about Back to the Future at this job we were doing and he was like I think kids love Back to the Future because everyone has that fantasy of saving their parents marriage or like making their

parents happy and Back to the Future 1 and 2 are definitely about Marty trying to save his family. Right. Right. That's the other thing for me definitely about Marty trying to save his family. Right. Right. That's the other thing for me. He's trying to, like, preserve the family unit, too. He's trying to, like, make a happy, happy family. Right.

Yeah. I think that's a great call. I think the other fundamental thing this franchise is about is, like, your relationship to your parents in that way. And your fear of, like, in which ways do i want to be like my parents and in which ways do i want to be the opposite of my parents it's so much about that like trying to outrun the legacy of your ancestors but also like define a future for yourself and i feel like this movie digs into all of that you're asking david what it's about other than like just it's fun sort of riffs and puzzle construction.

But it is so much about, as Nicole said, like Marty keeps on making these decisions that actively make things worse. Like he comes into this movie cocky because he nailed the first Back to the Future movie. Right, he did such a great job. He comes back to the present. Everything's great.

Right. Everything's perfect. Right. His parents are happy. His siblings are. Everything's great. Right. Everything's perfect. Right. His parents are happy. His siblings are happy. All that. Yeah. And I think a key detail that the movie kind of glosses over is that Doc has been gone for who knows how long.

Like, he flies off and then he shows up in Marty's parking, you know, his garage with the future time machine. But we don't know in Doc Brown's life how long he's been traveling around to different times. He has that suitcase with all the different denominations. He knows all about future technology. And he seems to have a much stronger sense of the rules of time travel and paradox and cause and effect and all this sort of stuff. His car takes garbage. Yeah, it's evil friendly.

We still don't have that. But he just, he knows everything. Like he's able to explain everything going on around him. Doc has no arc in this movie. Doc, yeah, I guess Doc doesn't really have an arc in this movie. Three is his movie.

Yes, three is his movie. But I didn't need it set in the wild, wild west. I just... You're just out on that. You don't want a western. Yeah. I didn't want a western. But then, that being said, I will watch it if it's on TV.

My favorite part about Doc returning is so Jennifer comes. Marty's looking at this car that he like fucking loves. And his parents are like looking at him lovingly in the house. And then they turn around and leave. And then an old man comes in a crazy car and they fly away with their son. That's like so funny to me. Perfect ending. And they're just in the house.

Will they notice that Marty's gone? Do they see the flying car like what no only biff what's happening with crispin glover and uh homegirl what's her name leah thompson uh leah thompson the best the yeah absolute best uh biggest crush for me when i was a kid uh biggest movie crush possibly of all time. Biggest thing to define early while talking about this movie is the Crispin Glover of it all, which has had, like, so many different stories

in terms of what happened, but he is not in this movie. Gale and, like, Zemeckis have always claimed that he asked for too much money. And so they balked and were like, well, we'll offer him the same amount we're offering leah

thompson and tom wilson rather than the amount we're offering uh michael j fox and christopher lloyd which is what he asked for and he'll like break in a couple weeks he'll come back to the negotiating table and agree to do it for the smaller amount and that never happened crispin glover's always contended that that wasn't what happened that it was more of like a philosophical thing and he had disagreements with them creatively right he says he doesn't like the ending of back to the future because he doesn't like that them being happy is just them being rich i get that it's this yuppie fantasy it's the car it's the book deal it's the nicer house it's all material but also he probably did ask for more

it's probably some combo like he probably was pissed off about it but if they paid him enough he would have done it because that's the you know that's life in hollywood right like but i believe him that he was like this is corny that i all all that i get is to be rich at the end of the movie but it's also like he's a weird guy they talk about how hard it was to work with him on the first movie because he just sort of is on a different wavelength i think after the first movie he has the letterman appearance where he starts kicking shit wait what he developed a reputation he went on letterman and started high kicking what that's wild then he did that movie with a rat willard he did i've never seen it yes i has anyone seen it i have seen it's so good yeah what is it about it's about a man who loves a rat wait i should see this it's about a man it

sounds good he loves so many rats yes oh it's so good do you know the michael jackson song ben nicole ben i don't think so gentle ben mich. It was Michael Jackson's first solo song, I think. It's like a ballad that he's singing. Oh, yeah. Do you know it? Sing it for me. To his dear friend, Ben. Ben, the two of us, we're with no more.

It's something like a, We will find what we are looking for. Like, it's like that. You know it. Singing. I know it. like it's like that singing i know it uh that song is the ballad from a 70s movie called ben which is a sequel to the original willard that the crispin glover willard is a remake about about a lonely guy whose only friends are rats who he uses to attack people who are mean to him

that's wild. And it's got this song that gets repurposed all the time because Michael Jackson was such a famous artist. And people view it as like this big, like, love ballad. And it's a song being sung from a grown man to a rat. And then the Crispin Glover remake sort of folds in the two original movies. So it has a cover of Ben in it that I want to say maybe Crispin Glover sings himself. But the movie is also about Ben the rat leading a revolution against Willard because he thinks they're not treating the rats with enough respect.

So then the rats end up attacking Willard in the last third of the movie. It rules. That honestly sounds truly wild and a real treat and i might watch it absolutely watch it griff uh or i just read about i forgot so i just watched him kick letterman he doesn't kick him in the face but he's inches away he basically comes really close to kicking david letter in the head. He stands up and is like, I'm strong. I can kick and does like a high kick. And Letterman is just like, all right, and gets off, gets up and walks off. And then they cut to commercial.

So clearly Letterman's like not into it. And then they cut back to Letterman and Crispin Glover is gone. And Crispin Glover has never explained this basically, right? Like he's never really accounted for this. Wow. To be a fucking insane person. I'm a performance artist. Right. Right.

I wonder. He's one of those people who's just like, I like to push boundaries. People can't handle what I'm doing. What is Crispin Glover's net worth? Let's find out. I can Google. Also, is Crispin his government name? All but certain his father was also a weirdo actor who played like a james bond henchman uh is that right and then became an acting teacher

so i'm pretty sure his crispin is his legal birth name because his father was not only is it his legal birth name his middle name is hellion hellion which is pretty crazy hellion chrispin hellion glover that's what a wild man is he married uh it's a great question he is he's never been married i feel like he's dated a lot of like burlesque models yeah he dated some like penthouse pets of the month uh he lives in the Czech Republic in like a castle. Honestly, the more I'm learning about this man is very funny. He's a real dream. What a wild man.

His net worth, if you Google it, is put at three and a half million dollars, which is plenty of money. But, you know, it's not like. I figured he would. He would have a little bit more but also who knows absolutely absolutely this is the other wrinkle to that nicole he's certainly made a lot of money in his career he openly says that when he takes big jobs things like the charlie's angels movies it is solely to then finance his own films he has directed two movies that have a cast almost entirely made up of uh uh

mentally handicapped people okay okay that are like very uh uh subversive and transgressive and he like builds his own sets and self-finances the movies entirely and then goes around and screens them like with one print reading poetry before and after the screenings i've seen honestly i'm here for it i really like it yeah yeah you're you're right but he's like absolutely a guy who spends millions of dollars making his own movies he has dated some stunning women yeah uh i'm looking at his his 17 bedroom check uh estate right now how wild it's pretty nice looking i mean for a 17 you know you you hear 17 bedroom check estate this is it's what you'd imagine oh he's got some frescoes i'm gonna what's a fresco you know where they just painted a painting right onto the wall

like no frame like it's just like art right on the wall yeah uh which is probably a pain in the ass he's got a fridge full of uh i've got a fridge full of frescas too i'm noticing he loves i don't think i've had a fresca oh you'd love it you'd love the one that it's not fizzy right willard it is fizzy and people on planes ask for it a lot. Can I have a Fresca or a Coke Zero? Fresca is like Sprite if it tasted more like actual fruit. Oh, interesting. I think I'm here for that. That's how I describe it.

It's a little more natural tasting. The thing I want to say, though, is Zemeckis goes off very quickly, starts working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is like a years-long project with all the technology they need to develop. But Universal wants Back to the Future 2, like immediately. So they go, if Fox and Lloyd are on board, we're down to do it.

And Fox and Lloyd go, sure. And they go, great. Start brainstorming Back to the Future 2. So from what I gather, Bob Gale writes a full draft of Back to the Future 2 by himself without Zemeckis first. Yeah. While Zemeckis is on Roger Rabbit.

He's like, you try something. Come back to me. Show me what it is. The screenplay is only credited to Bob Gale. Oh, fascinating. Zemeckis only has a story credit. But the big key is they knew they had to do the future at the beginning because of the end of the first movie. Right. But originally, the premise was not going back into the second film. The premise was Marty goes back to the 60s because there's another disruption to him and his siblings being born

in that it's Lorraine and George in college, and Lorraine is like a hippie radical who goes to jail. And I think George is like maybe pro-military. And he has to get his parents to conceive. That sounds lame. That was the original script was. It's him trying to get his parents to fuck. And also that kind of sounds. I don't want that.

That sounds like what he ends up doing with Forrest Gump. Like that's kind of with Forrest Gump. Like that's kind of what Forrest Gump is about, right? Like it's about the 60s and hippies and the war and all that. Forrest Gump is one of the wildest movies that would never get made today. If you made it today, you would go to jail. You'd be put in jail. You would go straight to jail. You'd go to jail.

But that being said, he plays Forrest Gump on loop during Christmas. And I will watch Forrest Gump four times in a row, no problem. Wow. Wow. I love Forrest Gump, and it's a terrible movie. Yeah, I mean, we're about to rewatch it. I have not seen it since I was eight. Really?

I'm very curious to see how it plays. I've truly seen it maybe a hundred times. I love Forrest Gump. Last time I got very drunk on a plane and I was watching Forrest Gump, and I was like three inches from the monitor, and I was just like, oh, Forrest, you're so silly. Yeah, I love Forrest Gump. He's quite a man.

He is silly. He's very silly. So that's the script that Gale writes by himself. And then they realize, A, we're not going to have Crispin Glover. So they go back to the drawing board in terms of rethinking. We have to make a Back to the Future 2 that doesn't really revolve around George. So they make the leap to, it should be about the absence of George. Like that defines the story. And then Zemeckis is the one who has the idea and says to Gale,

like, we're in a position that no one has ever been in before, which is we can make a sequel where we go back into the first movie. That was Zemeckis' big, like, clever idea. And so I want you to write to that, which I think is the other main thing this movie is about, David. It's about sort of like, as you said, Nicole, trying to keep your family together, you know, these series of decisions you make, the ripples they have onto everyone around you, trying to define your legacy, you know, live up to your ancestors or outpace them and find the future you want for yourself. But the other thing it's about is the difficulty of making a sequel. Not to get meta here, but I feel like this movie is explicitly about the audience expectations for a sequel to a film that everyone loves. Because it starts out like cashing in the exact thing that was promised to the audience that everyone got excited by. We're going, we don't need roads.

Holy shit, what's this place going to look like? First 30 minutes, just fucking balls to the wall future. Every technology you ever want to see, you repeat the classic bits from the first movie it's like the fucking second beat of a herald you do the diner again you do the skateboard chase again like it's just perfect sequel like same thing but different shit so then you get to act two and act two is everything's bad everything's bad they fucked everything up they tried to give you the exact movie you thought you wanted to see and it ruined everything. It didn't ruin the future. It ruined the status

quo, the happy ending from last time. This is a disaster. It's so bleak. It's so depressing. So then act three of the movie is like, fuck it. We just need to remake the first movie again. We tried doing something different. Audiences don't want different. We have to go back and do the exact same thing all movie again. Like, we tried doing something different. Audiences don't want

different. We have to go back and do the exact same thing all over again. And the fact that it's literally Marty from, like, different angles of the same scenes trying to reorchestrate, making things just 10% different while also making sure the scenes largely play out the same is, I think, explicitly Zemeckisis who's a guy who like otherwise didn't do sequels making a movie about the impossible position of like what do you do if everyone thinks they know what they want out of your movie if you are kind of handcuffed as a filmmaker into those expectations that's fun i like that yeah i don't know that's a good take and so but then the take on three is like and then three is zemeckis being like it'd be nice to make a western

that's like the opposite of the high stakes stuff you're talking about where he's like what is it to make a sequel to this movie maybe it was so much of a headache to do too that they were like let's let it breathe let's put it so far away from the first two that like you can't even get back into the first two right right i'm about to blow your minds this is what's so wild the only reason three exists is because zemeckis loves the wild west and he wanted to make a western homage right they clearly just shoehorn the back to the future franchise into this genre that he likes so he could like play in that sandbox. I also saw some behind the scenes interview from 1985 with Michael J. Fox where they ask him like, if you had a time machine for real, where would you go?

And he's like, Wild West, I love cowboys. So I think everyone involved just liked Western movies and thought it would be fun to do a Western movie. I mean, I don't hate i mean the wild west was originally act three of back to the future two they wrote one script that was 185 pages right wait really yes i mean that's the wild thing right i could see that that was 2015 then they go to the alternate right 1985 high no they weren't gonna go they weren't going to go to the old movie. Oh, they weren't going to do the old movie. It was going to be, they have to go back to the Wild West, I think, in order to correct it.

It was going to be like future Hellscape, alternate present Old West, I think. I'm really glad they didn't do that in the second movie. That would just be too much. Because the second, like Back to the Future 2 is almost too much it is almost very overwhelming oh boy yeah but for me it's like just enough yeah i think that's fair i mean it would be it's like a maximalist movie but it could not handle anymore spielberg is the one who said this is too long long. You can't film this. If you guys want to make a Wild West movie, just make it two films. We can shoot them back to back. It was sort of the first modern movie to do that, Back to the Future.

One had been so big that they were like, you can make two. The audience is there. Shoot them at the same time. We're all good. But that's the other reason why three feels so light. Because three is essentially what was meant to be a third act stretched for an entire movie. 3 has no stakes, like zero stakes. It's just a fun time.

3 is just like Doc Brown romance movie. Yes. But I don't hate it. I like seeing Doc happy. Right. Gentlemen 6, you love these characters. You like to see them have fun. 3 is a fun Lloyd showcase. Like that's great for him. Like it's fun to see them have fun three is a fun lloyd showcase like that's and that's

great for him like it's fun to see but it also griff like what you're talking about makes sense to me but it's also the movie the first movie has such specific stakes and the car can't be used except if you have lightning or nuclear right like you can barely use the car right and in the second one it's like okay now we got the car and we can do whatever we want so let's take it for a spin car does everything now and it can fly right it can catch you it can be part of every set piece and it's kind of like exhausting intentionally like if you really had a freaking flying car that could go back and forth in time forward in in time. Like, yeah, you would exhaust yourself. You'd probably mess everything up. It's too much power, right? Like,

that's kind of what's going on here. Yeah. I mean, this is the only one of the three that's, like, really primarily a time travel movie. Like, a movie that is about time travel. The first one is a movie where he gets stuck in the past in order to tell the story they want to tell, which is, what if you were the same age as your parents? The third movie is this love story in the old west in which they have to get back to the present at the very, very end. This one is like, fuck it. We had a huge hit. We're going to have whatever budget we want. He's like pioneered all these groundbreaking effects with Roger Rabbit. So he comes back to the table wanting to show off all these new tricks he's learned. But it's very much the movie that's like, let's just do everything you could do with a flying time traveling car. Let's just do all

the shit, which I think is part of the joy is that it's like so fucking jam packed. So do you want to talk about some some specific stuff in the movie, Girth? Scene by scene? Is there stuff you want to get into yeah right off the bat they lose the actress claudia wells who played jennifer in the first movie yeah because her mom got sick and she just decided okay sure she didn't want to act she just quit acting she just quit acting she just like quit acting okay now owns like an armani store in los angeles and does a lot of conventions okay enough but she just went like completely off the grid. And unlike George, where they could write around him, write him out, reuse footage,

put someone else in makeup, they were like, well, the end of the first movie is fucking Jennifer getting in the car with Doc Brown and Marty. We have to do something. I do feel like Elizabeth, who's a good actress in general. Her performance in this is so broad, but also the character is so thankless in terms of all Jennifer does in this movie is faint. The movie is immediately like, can we get rid of her? Like, it just has that, like, let's just knock her out. They leave her in an alleyway.

They leave her in the garbage. They, like, throw her in the garbage they like throw her in the garbage they just keep putting her like put her in a closet put her on a street corner put them in a dumpster she just keeps fainting and they keep leaving her incapacitated in different places which it's not that's their fault for making that series of decisions it's kind of a glorping on a major scale where it's just like, how do we not deal with this character? But there's also the problem of like when you recast it and you have a new actress who looks entirely different, has a different energy. No, she doesn't. They look exactly the same.

I never, I didn't clock it. When I was a kid, I definitely did not realize it was different people. I didn't know it was a different girl until today when my roommate was like, oh, that's Elizabeth Shue because we watched Adventures in Babysitting last night and I didn't know who Elizabeth Shue was. And he was like, that's the lady from Adventures in Babysitting. I was like, oh, I didn't know she was in the Back to the Futures. And he's like, no, just this one. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, she replaced the original actress.

And I was like, huh, okay. They look exactly the same to me. I always found it super glaring. But Shu was also like a bigger deal at this point. Well, because of Adventure Babysitting. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Adventure Babysitting, yeah. That's true.

She's a hot property, but this is a hot sequel, right? I mean, I don't know. Cocktail was the year before I think. And she's, she's the love interest kind of a movie star on her own. Right. Yeah. Um,

but she's fine, but you know, it just sucks that they, or whatever, they just don't know what to do with her. It feels like they are like, ah, shit.

We like wrote that she got in the car. Like, I guess we have to, you know, like it's only that because they want to have a marty and doc adventure that's what they want to have that's you know that's what they want the sequel to be but i bring this up only because it adds the weird layer with the first scene of the movie being a shot for shot remake of the ending of the last movie

they can't reuse it because they have a different actress. So it feels like people have done the side-by-side compilations. It's like them trying to match their line readings almost identically, the same shots, the same timing, but it's all just recreated,

which the whole last third of the movie ends up being. And then you go to 2015, which just fucking rules. And I said this to you david i feel like this is still like the vision of the future and pop culture that people use as a reference point most and in in that way nicole what you were saying of like when 2015 came around people kept on talking about yeah how disappointed they were like it was so fixed in people's brains

that's the year we're gonna have a spiky metal helmet that anyone can just wear like i was ready for it i mean i would want it you can do that ben nicole buy one yeah i'll buy one we can wear them together just we'll be two little spiky helmeted people all that stuff is just so i love his whole look i love the fun like you say that they're having griffin where you go back to the diner you know you have all those kinds of jokes but like i like the differences like griff is just it's like bullies in the future will be like hyper bullies like it'll just be like they'll be like double the bully they'll be like on coke or something like you know what i mean like that things are everything in the future is just sort of louder and more colorful and more ridiculous

like in good ways and bad like wait what's the jaws sequel like jaws 19 or what i can't remember the number yeah jaws 19 it's really really real i think it's the tagline it's really really personal it's the most personal and it's like credited as being directed by spielberg's son oh that's fun that is funny the shark still looks fake i i do like i mean we're like talking about uh tom wilson arguably being the mvp of this movie his take on griff is that he's like a short-circuiting cyborg. Like, there are obviously all these things. Like, there's that moment where he grows taller, but even just the way he speaks and moves his body, it's like he's a robot that's been, like, doused in water, where he just keeps on going, like, McFly, I don't know what you're... Like, everything is like...

But also, you have to remember that Biff is his dad. Imagine Biff was your dad. you would be fucked up too yeah he's fucked up his mom he's probably glitching because he's been hit so many times right right i guess or no biff's his grandpa right right hits him with a cane so wait biff's his grandfather so yeah who's his dad yeah who did griff yeah yeah drift right briff who fucked biff actually the worst he's the worst this is the thing i was arguing i like to david is that two is where they start to like heighten biff into being like a cosmic force he's like elemental idea that just like right at any point in time, there is a Tannen who represents the worst of all humanity. There's always a Tannen.

Yeah. Yeah. Is this the one where they are absolutely like he is Donald Trump? Like, or what? Do they have the Trump concept from the beginning? It's this one where he's a mogul. It's 100% Trump. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's explicitly like, I mean mean the hair is near identical minus the side burns um and and it is i mean it's one of those things i feel like gail and zemeckis have to talk about this in interviews all the time now but they were like donald trump was the example of the grossest kind of person at that point in the late 80s. So we just thought it'd be funniest if like that's the kind of tacky billionaire that he would be,

not ever thinking it was possible that that kind of guy could become president. Like they stopped themselves at, Biff can't be elected to higher office. He's just a rich guy. It's just, that strains credibility. There's no way he would be elected. It's just so strains credibility. There's no way he would be elected. It's just so funny that he is our president, knowing that everyone has seen this movie.

Right. Right. The whole world saw this movie. This is bad. And we're like, give it to us. We're going to elect it. We want this. They warned us in a very popular movie that people like. Yeah. I always talk about, too, there's this Sesame Street TV special. It was like the 30th anniversary of Sesame Street or something that was about Donald Trump buying Sesame Street to tear it down and install a new building. And Joe Pesci played Donald Trump post-Oscar. It's Joe Pesci and the character's name is Ronald Grump. But they style him exactly like Trump in the suit and the red tie with the wig and the eyebrows.

And I'm like, in 1992 or whatever, you could do a Sesame Street special where an Academy Award winner played this guy, and everyone accepted that he was the villain. That he was a Biff-level cosmic evil. And then 20 years later, he goes. It's so wild that like someone's so stupid as our president whatever we don't talk about it but like in hill valley when it's all shitty the thing that like really got me is when uh marty goes to his home climbs in his window and there's a little black girl in her bed and i was like oh because it's a bad neighborhood the black people now live in his house yeah i was like can we be a little bit more creative just have them be fucking hillbillies

they didn't have to be black but then i was like well we didn't get any black people in the movie so i guess i should be grateful right the only you got goldie wilson you have goldie wilson that's the only black character right um but like yes the the the transformation of it into a bad neighborhood is pretty lame the only the the only thing is that then the whole city is just ruined like so i guess it's all bad like like what did biff do what i like that it's dystopian griff to be clear i enjoy that it's you know, ludicrously, hellishly bad. But like, what the hell happened? Like, it's just that he like bought up all the property.

Is that what he did? I think it might be the same thing Trump has done where he's given tax breaks. Oh, wait, I guess he's not the president. So I don't. Yeah, I guess he just has this big hotel casino. It just like sucks up all, right. It's in like people wasted their money and couldn't pay their mortgages. And then they're homeless and shooting each other in the streets.

I loved the, I don't think it was a chalk outline. It was like a tape outline of bodies on the street. Yes. That made me laugh so hard. I was like, they left it there. They didn't take it away after they took the bot they left it the other thing is when you see when marty's like outside the pleasure palace and there's the video playing of the like the museum like how did biff become the luckiest

man in the world you see the newspaper headlines of him buying off the government over and over again there's like the idea that he's the one who bought off enough senators or whatever to get gambling legalized. You see that one of the businesses he started was toxic waste disposal. Like it's just that he's this guy who's like reveled in the worst of humanity and has either made money off of doing things that like hurt the people around him or has paid off government officials to legalize the bad things he wants to do so i i think it's like yeah he also dates marilyn monroe and right there's a picture of him with marilyn monroe and then he dates like other beautiful women then they're like he settled down with the love of his life lorraine i'm like what's in

lorraine's pussy that this man is the richest man in the world he is dating marilyn monroe and he's like not for me i gotta go get this lady from the 50s who didn't want me i'm gonna put some titties in her like what the fuck is there has to be something in her pussy like donald trump right we all agree the whole thing is just his dad not loving him like everything is so clearly rooted in wanting his dad's approval you can see with this type of person just being like i never got over the fact that i was punched in the face while trying to sexually assault this woman beyond that that also that you know he approaches her in the street as well like that she like loudly rejects him and he

like right like she totally like uh humiliates him anytime he's doing his awful like you're gonna be my like basically just grabbing her like you say nicole right like he's humiliated by lorraine and by george and for a guy this simplistic it makes sense that he'd just be like cool i will murder george and lock l Lorraine into a loveless marriage. It's so wild. You know, like, weird movie. Because it doesn't seem like, I mean, you see him in the hot tub with other women. Obviously, he's paid for her to get this breast job,

but their romance, like, there's no romance left in their marriage. It doesn't even feel like they have a sexual relationship anymore. It literally just feels like he's like a dragon wanting to keep a woman locked in a tower. Yeah. You know?

And my favorite part in that scene is when Marty comes back and he's like a dragon wanting to keep a woman locked in a tower yeah and my favorite part in that scene is when marty comes back and he's like by the vault or whatever and he's you know talking about how uh an older man told him about the almanac whatever whatever and then he was like oh you your car hit the the manure truck and he's like how do you know about that and he's like my dad told me he's like you're dead he's like before he died he went oh okay that made me laugh so hard because i was like for for a hot second did biff think a dead man told this kid something it's such a funny flying car at this point yeah i also right like when he goes back and then you see Marty, like, I also had the brain thing of, like, wait, is he, like, supposed to still somehow be Lorraine's son with Biff? Like, but then, no, right?

No, yeah, because of George. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. That's all fun. That's a big part of it. also the other thing i like about that moment uh nicole is it's like well the the manure thing is really prevalent in marty's mind because that happened to him yesterday right or like three days ago but the idea that biff reacts so strongly he's never gotten over even though this thing was 30

years ago yeah like i just like the idea that biff is still haunted by the five days that marty mccly was in the 50s. Like getting rejected by Lorraine, getting punched by George, getting manure dumped on him, like his entire life has been like, I need to succeed to overcome that in this very Trumpian way. But once again, Zemeckis and Gale, you're like, well, how was he able to damage society this much? They had to argue it was just through his business dealings because their thought was there is no way someone this transparently ugly and boorish would ever be elected by a general populace okay uh so instead he's just a billionaire with a lot of influence here's another question i have a key thing in this movie is that marty hates being called a chicken he like goes wild if anyone

calls him a chicken and it basically like where we sort of see like it kind of ruined his life because he like had this hand injury right like he hurts himself and he never gets into a car crash and because of the car crashing the car gives up his music career he never sends his stuff into the record labels right is needles needles fucked him up is that all this is that's all new right like that's and needles is played by flea right yes all of it new needles is new the chicken stuff is new i remember watching this is not new kid is it not that's my question like it's it's not in the first movie yes all. Yes, it is. I can't remember the scene. But hold on.

Let me Google it because I'm pretty sure. Because we watched it very recently. You know what? I'm pretty sure it's in the first movie. Now I'm finding it. Well, because there is a scene in the diner. It says Back to the Future Part One. I guess Biff calls him a chicken yes okay in that original like diner showdown where you have crispin glover and biff is putting

his paws on leah thompson and she slaps him and that's when marty gets in the fight with him he doesn't react in the same like bananas way where he like just kind of like you know sirens start going off in his head but yes it is in the first movie that's what i was trying to remember thank you nicole i couldn't remember if they made it up or like you know but this movie he doesn't know nobody calls me chicken right the thing i've heard gail say in interviews is they realized marty had no internal conflict whatsoever because marty's so busy the coolest kid right in the first movie with all the time shit that he doesn't he's barely he's that's how good michael j fox is in these movies like marty's just so inherently lovable

like even though right you barely he likes to play the guitar right like that's about all we know about him right and he hangs out with an old scientist. He loves hanging out with an old scientist, which I take as, like, he his dad, he wants a dad. He wants, like, a proper dad. He wishes his dad was an eccentric lunatic,

instead of a pathetic, put-upon man. But yes, Marty, it's like one of the best movie star performances of all time in the first one because there's almost nothing to play there he's almost entirely reactive and he's just a guy who's pretty good at everything and pretty cool and charming at everything like it shouldn't work but he's so good at reacting to people comedically and he's just so charming um that this one they were like there has to be some like

inner conflict within marty i guess they took the chicken thing which he obviously doesn't react to in such a like uh nuclear way in the first movie and made it like oh this is his entire achilles heel his his kryptonite is calling him a chicken you could get him to do anything and it will ruin his life so that there was something for him to push against in a larger sense um that's fine now i appreciate that marty has a little bit of an ego that's cool like i i'm cool with having a chip on his shoulder but i think i prefer how biff is so wild and different and dominant in the future and and in the past the marty stuff like it's like you it should be more michael j fox should be more fun as all these other people and i feel like especially like old marty like you know he's just kind of a loser like it's kind of a repeat of the first. It's okay.

Like, I'm not as invested in all the Marty stuff. Is that crazy? I mean, it's his fear of, I mean, it happens pretty quickly. Like, they don't live in it for too long. That whole big house sequence, I feel like, is mostly a showcase for the technology, which this is the first movie to really use like computer controlled cameras with actors playing against themselves. So that's the big breakthrough is it used to be if you had one actor playing two characters in one scene,

you had to like have it be the exact same camera position without cuts, with a clear line or some object in the middle that was separating the two of them. And this, he has, like, camera movements and wild sort of things happening, objects interacting with each other, which a lot of it is shit he learned from Roger Rabbit, obviously, like, having to shoot around two different elements and also how to, like, puppeteer props and stuff

so that they can be carried over from one part of a frame to another between characters um but i feel like this is just him doing the like wowie gadgetry of a oh it gives michael j fox something fun to play he gets to do a bunch of new things b right i'm gonna show off how like no one's ever seen something like this in a movie before. And they talk about like every in the big family dinner scene, every single prop was like super glued down because the shots wouldn't work if anything was misaligned. Right. So they shot it over like a week where he was shooting the different parts with the camera hooked up to all these computers. So it would replicate the exact same timing and the same angles of the camera moves over and over again and then the second to last day there was an earthquake and they were like we fucked it up

it's like the whole thing's ruined they had armed guards outside of the set overnight to make sure no one broke in and fucked with the set because it would have cost them like millions of dollars and then there was this earthquake and they were like god damn it and they walked on and it was fine it was like an act of god that the set was somehow fine they shot the final day and finished it that's cool um george being upside down in the like uh back harness right was because they thought crispin glover was gonna retreat and offer agree to do the movie for less money so they were like oh we'll punish him by making wow that's rude yeah oh my god yeah yeah that's hilarious they just hire some look-alike actor to do an impression and we're like oh by the way you're

gonna have to be upside down for 10 days of filming damn that sucks but then didn't crispin uh he sued them right and he did for a bunch of money uh yeah he's like it's a classic image rights case basically right he's like i am you can't use my face right like that i mean the makeup was designed to look like him they have an impersonator from different angles doing some of the 1950s stuff and then you they also reuse and photos of him and stuff right yeah and he's he's just like no it's not allowed and now like i i think he made a good portion of his net worth from yeah probably being in this movie truly because it was a pretty open and shut case and it like it defined the rest of the industry like it changed all the rules we gotta thank

crisp and glover for getting paid for our likeliness yeah i mean that's cool i'm now i'm sort of looking at christmas i wonder if his nickname is crisp crispy professor crispy crisp yeah crispy crispy gloves it is funny that they do work he does work with zemeckis again one day in beowulf he did finally they must have made peace eventually well the other weird thing is when he talks about in interviews he's like i have no problems with bob zemeckis he's a gentleman we work together in Beowulf. I had a lovely time. I hate Bob Gale. Oh, wow.

Bob Gale. He hates the other guy. Okay. Nicole has, like, very much been the, like, spokesperson for the franchise and the ambassador. He doesn't really make many things after Back to the Future. And so while Zemeckis goes on and does all these other things in his career, Gale has always been sort of, like, the steward, does all the interviews, does all the promotional appearances, like oversaw the animated series

and the ride and all that There was an animated series? Oh, yeah. I've been watching it and I enjoy it thoroughly. Ew. It's mostly about Doc Brown's kids.

There's like kids? It's mostly about his two little boys. Yes. Jules and Vern. They get into trouble yes Jules and Vern they get into trouble the other one is like a rebel Bart Simpson kid and they get into trouble and then Marty and Doc have to follow this it is it must be streaming somewhere I have it on DVD that's been Griffin Griffin you have it on DVD and I've been watching all of it at night I have the DVD the complete series back to the future

wow there's two seasons who knew two seasons let's see where is it though Mary Steenburgen okay it returns sure yes and so is Thomas Wilson Christopher Lloyd but no Christopher Lloyd does

live Christopher Lloyd does live action the beginning and end of every episode is doc brown live action in his lab teaching science lessons that relate to the episode you're about to see and bill nye does that that is christopher lloyd doesn't do the voice it's dan castaneda castellaneta from the simpsons does doc brown animated and christopher lloyd does like eight minutes live it's not streaming you would have to buy the dvd which is only available used but for like for like 10 bucks it says on the wikipedia that it's a french-american animated science fiction comedy what do you mean french-american griffin please explain is it french i guess it must have been

like a french production company um here wait let me hold this up it does say you can see it virtual background oh okay yeah oh yeah okay yeah yeah all right um uh but yes that that series is very much like every time they're like oh no my kids have escaped to the civil war oh no and they have to like follow the kids and then there's like general beauregard tannin and they're like oh no biff's a confederate and then oh and it takes place after back to the future three so that's why mary steenberg's it, because he's with his wife Clara. Oh, and it's his sons, Jules and Vern. I get it. His sons.

It's wild that she's the one who was like, yeah, I'll do all the episodes, considering that she was a fucking Academy Award winner. Well, maybe she really responded to the material. Clara's a great character. Anyway, that's the wild thing I've been watching. But Glover's always been very anti-Gale. He's like, Gale keeps on spreading false rumors about me and how difficult I was.

I don't like him. I don't respect him. So there's forever beef on that front. But whatever. They're not making any more Back to the Future, so, you know, all good. But I wish they would. I want another one.

I suppose it's not impossible. This is the other thing. Back to the Future is in that last time period where they made deals like this, where Bob Zemeckis and Robert Gale, why did I say Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Bob and Bob have to approve of anything. They're not allowed to do anything Back to the Future

without both of them signing off on it, which now studios don't give people that type of kill rights. Yeah, absolutely not. They're like, no, it's our fucking shit. We're going to do whatever back to the future without both of them signing off on it which now studios don't give yeah absolutely not they're like no it's our fucking shit we're gonna do whatever we want with it that's wild right but like yeah christopher lloyd's like it will never be remade so let's uh let's throw them up in there let's for back to the future four let's get uh i mean doc was already a thousand years old in the first movie yes and he's such a funny no sorry where he gets no no you go when he takes his face off right we're all thinking about that that's really such a funny gag it is funny because right you have the

joke in the first movie that like oh the documet's really old now let's go back in time he barely looks any younger and then this one starts out where you're like, well, we're now stuck with old Brown as the neutral. We don't want Christopher Lloyd wearing prosthetic wrinkles the whole movie. So let's explain that he had this experimental future rejuvenation technology and he can look 30 years younger.

And then he pulls it off and he looks exactly the same. It's perfect. I love it. Now you said, like the first act is the stuff that you said you get the most excited about, David. The third act is the stuff that like the magic trick of we get to remake the first movie and like tinker with the scenes and show them from different perspectives and fit into all these crevices you know like doc brown talking to himself that's fun i i don't know there's something odd about the third act that even though i know biff is insane it's kind of insane how much he's trying

to kill him you know what i mean like with the with the car chase and all that he knows that the future is going to change if he doesn't kill him or his present he's got higher stakes to it yes um i love griff the the ending ending of the third like i love the lightning strike i love all the this sort of like time travel joy of like the guy showing up and being like i was told to be here on this day like you know from this that that that i love like that's the kind of time travel shit that always gets me excited i guess i enjoyed the tour back to the first movie but i'm just kind of like i love that first movie so much. Like I'm almost worried that they're messing with it.

Maybe, maybe that's what, what sort of sets my teeth on it. I don't know. Messing with it. It adds to the first movie. Like the first time I watched back to the future too, I then went back and watched back to the future one and then enjoyed the,

like the, the dance in a different way because i knew more information about the dance uh right the idea that there's also a little sneaky sneaky marty off to the side just right out of frame and all those early scenes i think it's another effective commentary thing and like what you're saying david like if people love a first movie, their fear with the sequel is, is this going to ruin the first movie for me? Like, can a sequel retroactively make the first movie worse? Which is why people get, like, defensive about new installments and franchises, right? And this movie is like, we're literally having a character walk into the edges of the scenes you've already loved and try his hardest to make sure the first movie

doesn't get ruined. Like he's just barely keeping everything at bay. Right. I just think that's so fun. I agree. It's fun. Thank you.

I like it. I like it. I think it's great. You sound reluctant. What we want is for you to go, I love it, baby. Ooh, ooh, scootabow. That is famously what I always do No I dig it

I think I sort of just Enjoy the invention of the first The first act and the second act more because There's so Like Zemeckis is so good at That kind of world building Like all the little jokey stuff in the future all the little jokey stuff in the nightmare world like all the little details that

are crammed into the frame like those are just very delightful to like take in and like chuckle at like like scene after scene after scene right sure yeah yeah yeah and that's that's when he's doing all the second beat stuff like all the mirroring of earlier scenes and also the fact that hill valley is so based around that town square that you get to like re-theme that one area you can always play with the different storefronts and what the clock tower is transformed into do we know how he killed george do they explain it or is it just that he killed with a gun yeah right yes right right yeah right in the face pop up i think as a kid i was so entranced by the idea of the almanac i liked sports pages in general anyway like i always liked just like that there was a part of of the newspaper that was just like all these little tables, you know, all this like really boring data.

And like the idea that you could use that to become so rich. I don't know. I think I was taking away a lot of the wrong messages from this movie when I was 10 years old. They should call you Biff Sims. He's the MVP. I think Tom Wilson, Thomas Wilson. I don't know if he's whatever. I think he's the MVP of this movie.

He's the one who gets to do the most new stuff, and it's joyful. Like, I think Lloyd kind of gets a better showcase in three. Is that fair? And, yeah, and Fox, they, like, sort of satiate him by letting him play all the other characters, because other than that, he's just kind of running around the whole movie. I mean, it feels like all the family stuff is just a gift to him so he has something to chew on as an actor but the tom wilson stuff's the best uh his big monologue to marty like explaining the safe leading up to them on the rooftop where he's threatened to kill him

is so good but for me the big tom wilson scene is the car scene between young biff and old biff is like so fucking good and both of those performances are so good and the frustration of old biff dealing with how stupid young biff is and like the self-hatred of that you know like they're just like put in a safe no of course you don't have a safe right like he just has such contempt for himself um they're so clever too of like they still zemeckis is still using like weird dividers to to be able to build the split screen around for any scene where it's two actors talking themselves so with like the two doc browns outside the clock tower you have the flagpole in car, you have the divider of the windshield. There's that scene where Marty is, like, in the wings while the prom performance is happening,

where they have, like, the ladder in the way. And the ladder looks composited. Like, it's got the weird sort of, like, green screen glow around it. And he does this thing that he does all the time, which is, like like go out of your way to make something look like it's really there so he has the the marvin barry actor walk around the ladder that's not really there just to try to sell it there's another one where that when the car is flying out of like the shitty uh hill valley cul-de-sac it hits a bunch of boxes and like trash falls over and the car is

clearly a model and the trash is real and that's such a roger rabbit thing of like he must have just had seven pas holding on to wires attached to the trash just pulling the trash so that they could later composite the car in there but it's all that like zemeckis nerd shit that i love i love that too i love all those tiny little details that that's joyous and like i don't know like the if you think about this movie i think like in it's an 80s movie it's in the era of blade runner like having like a shiny crunchy silly future versus a terrifying future and having a terrifying present instead like all that i appreciate i think that is a nice spin on the 80s concept of what's going to happen to us

and you have that that final act that's like uh you know the the metatextual stuff yeah i mean i like your take i love your take griffin can say that? He's trying to save the first movie. Yes. And he's also, like, the stakes are high because of the Biff shit. Like, as we know, Biff is a full-on fucking psycho. He's going to murder his dad. So, is there a better Back to the Future 3? Like, say someone, like, just talks to Zemeckis and is like, Bobby, like...

And, like, I like Back to the Future 3. We're going to have a fun time talking about it. But you know what I mean? Like, is there a way to heighten this movie further? Or is this about as bananas as you can be? Like is this sort of like is Zemeckis right to be like

we should sort of chill out for the next one and kind of stay put? Do you have any takes on this Nicole? I got like a really wild take I thought of while watching this. But I want to hear if you have anything. No. What's your wild take? I do think to some degree, this movie goes so bug nuts that the third one has to be scaled back in some kind of way.

You have to bring it back to more of like an emotional character story away from it being the wild, like they can travel everywhere. The car can do anything. We're jumping all around multiple timelines. I do like the idea of it being sort of set. And the other good thing about the Wild West premise is that you're like, oh, they're at a time really devoid of technology.

It's really hard for them to get out of it. It's really hard for them to fix the car. That's good. The thought I had watching this one was like, would it be cooler if they went to like prehistoric times? If you're going to do this premise, is it cooler if it's Doc and Marty? Yeah.

No. Nicole shaking her head. No, Doc Brown is too old. You don't want to see a body double running away from a T-Rex. It's just, you don't want it. I'm telling you right now, it would be very bad. Okay. It's also like, what, four or five years before Jurassic Park.

So like the dinosaurs would not have looked good. Like they were just ahead of that dinosaur breakthrough. It would have still been like stop motion-y dinosaurs. It would have been, yeah, it would have been goofy. Yeah. Let's wrap up. Is there any, we should play the box office game, Griff. Is there anything else you want to hit before I kick that off?

Yeah, I want to do a brief merchandise spotlight. The hoverboard in the film has the Mattel logo stamped on it, which they did for Versamilitude. They were like, we like the idea of this not just being a high-end technology, but a thing that like little kids play with.

Let's get a real toy company to put their name on it so it looks like a real cheesy product. But that combined with the fact that when Back to the Future 2 was coming out, they did this very weird thing that's on the DVD set called Back to the Future Night, where they played the first movie on network TV

for the first time, but did a behind the scenes plus sneak preview of the next movie special that's hosted by Leslie Nielsen. It's Leslie Nielsen, like, after Naked Gun has made him a star, wearing a tuxedo, getting out of the DeLorean, telling no jokes whatsoever, being super dry and just going like, hello, I'm Leslie Nielsen. You might know me as a movie star, but that's not why I'm here today. I'm here because I love time travel.

And it's just him saying like, I love Back to the Future. Don't we all miss Doc and Marty? But in that thing, they show this behind the scenes peak of the hoverboard sequence, which I feel like was their big money sequence. Like you're not gonna believe the special effects of this thing. And in that, Robert Zemeckis says, you know, hoverboards are real.

They're like a real technology that the toy companies have had for years and years and years, but they've never been able to sell them because the government won't approve of them. So we just got Mattel to loan us a hoverboard in making the movie. And because of that, kids for years saw that special, saw it it with the logo thought the hoverboard was real and mattel got letters for like five years after this movie begging them to release a hoverboard and they just had to like majorly majorly course correct and like say like it was a lie and people were like why are you covering up the truth you told us the truth the first time it's a conspiracy all the hoverboards are in a warehouse somewhere. I would never buy a hoverboard. They seem very dangerous to me. Why?

I would buy a hoverboard. What if I fell over? What if I fell and then I hurt myself? That's fine. Get some knee pads. What's wrong with you? Be adventurous. Buy a box of band-aids. The closest thing we have are those things on wheels, right? The little boards that are on two wheels where you kind of like lean forward. A hoverboard.

They're called hoverboards. That's the thing. A hoverboard. They're called hoverboards. That's the thing that sucks about them. They're called hoverboards, but they're pretenders to the throne. I got so excited when people were like, oh, kids now are buying all these hoverboards. And I was like, what? They did it? And then I saw that dumb fucking

segue without a handle bullshit. That's essentially what it is. It's a segue without handles. They're dangerous. I've been on one and I've also fallen off one. I'd buy a hoverboard tomorrow. Alright, fine. I don't know. I'm too old for hoverboards. But when I was a kid, I wanted a hoverboard.

That's the introduction of 90s style. That sort of green, pink, neon, the way it's tricked out. That's my childhood. That's what everything looked like the way it's like tricked out that's like my childhood that's what everything looked like when i was when i was a kid and that's that's great yeah griff let's talk about the box office it rules it's so cool uh i want to hoverboard also that sequence is one of those things where it's like that alone i think shot took four weeks to shoot because it's essentially like michael j fox wearing an iron maiden being

suspended from cables like a marionette puppet to get like one shot at a time it's such wild stuff that they make look kind of effort right everything in this movie looks very effortless which is impressive yeah uh this movie came out griffin thanksgiving 1989 november 24th it was not iron maiden chastity belt is what I meant to say. Okay. Wearing a harness for flying scenes is like a chassis belt. That's the joke I wanted to make. I apologize.

It wasn't worth going back to. Okay. David box office. It opened. It was a very big movie. It made lots and lots of money. It made $43 million in its opening weekend. That's wild.

That's too much money. Tons of money for the 80s. You know, everyone was happy. Like, I don't think it made as much as the original movie ended up making, but big opener. Number two, Griffin. It's 89? 89. Now, number two, Griffin.

Nicole, Griff's going to guess the top five movies of this weekend. Number two is a notorious bomb, like from a huge star. Like, but one of his most famous bombs okay i'm sorry say say the the date of the weekend again it's november 24th no thanksgiving 1989 it's november fuck okay uh notorious flop from a huge star is it an action guy it's a comedy guy but this is like a serious movie that he's doing fuck it's comedy guy doing a serious and he did and it's not he directed it and he directed it why am i not thinking of this it's like this is so obvious right i would say it's a pretty it's not like a movie people remember that well but people like it's a famous flop it's like this is so obvious right i would say it's a pretty it's not like a movie people remember that well but pete like it's a famous flop it's a fame like it's a big comedy star

he put two other big comedy legends in it he directed it he wrote it like it was his huge passion project harlem knights it's harlem knights eddie murphy richard pryor red fox you know big period piece uh huge flop that's what it is have you ever seen it when you look at it i mean harlem nights did make it did it did but you know i feel like at the time everyone just lambasted it right like it just got this like terrible have you ever seen harlem nights anyone has anyone ever seen harlem nights i sure haven't no i mean neither have i i kind of always been wanted i've always wanted to check it out because i i love eddie i've seen most of them i don't know why i've never seen that one i remember hearing some interview with him where they were like do

you like directing would you ever do it again after harlem nights and he was like no people just kept on coming up to me and asked me what i thought of this pillow in the background i don't care that was the way he described directing. He was like, just stop asking me about pillows. Alright, Griff. Number three, it's the Disney movie. It's a cartoon animated film. Big hit. 1989. It's a big hit. It's The Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid. It's just starting, but it's gonna make tons and tons of money. Number four. Another huge comedy. Huge comedy of the year. One huge comedy huge comedy of the year one of the biggest movies of the year very gimmicky um a director we will do on the show one day not twins twins similarly gimmicking um sort of revives someone's career oh is it uh fuck it's someone will do someday it's not yes oh oh god no but it is like career revivals yeah yeah well and maybe that's a bit it's uh it's a kids movie

it's like a kids comedy hocus pocus kids that's a great guess but no it's not only i shrunk the kid no not honey i shrunk the kid but it does involve special effects sort of i guess something crazy is happening in this movie something crazy something unusual is the title describing the wild thing that's happening it's describing it's like i can, I can't describe the title. It's, you know, oh, something's happening. Ghost Dad. That's what the title is. What if there was a ghost dad? No, come on, Griffin.

Comedy director. It's a big comedy director who will probably cover someday. It's not Ivan Reitman. No, female director it's it's a penny marshall movie nope no it's oh it's look who's talking it's look who's talking look amy heckerling's talk look who's talking with john travolta and a talking baby voiced by bruce willis yes that's what the movie is it was one of the biggest hits of the year. And then there's another huge hit. A famous sappy movie is number five.

A famous crier. A famous crier. Steel Magnolias. Steel Magnolias. Oh, wait. I got that right? This is a hot... You got it right.

Nailed it. This is a hot five. That's a hot five, I think. Those are Harlem Nights big bomb, but you know. 89 was so big. And I feel like 89 was a year where the biggest opening weekend record was broken like four times. Like I think Ghostbusters 2 broke it. And then Batman broke what Ghostbusters 2 had broken.

You had a lot of big sequels for the first time you had a lot of movie stars at their peak it was wild uh yeah no you're right 89 the big movies are batman indiana jones back to the future 2 lethal weapon 2 like it's a lot of big sequels there's a lot of gimmicky movies like look who's talking we gotta we gotta Nicole go. I'm sorry. We gotta let Nicole go. I know. I don't have to apologize. We did it, but we don't want to hold you any longer. So thank you for being on the show.

No. Thank you for having me. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Nicole. See you, Nicole. And then there was three. And then there was three. And then there was three. She froze while waving goodbye and smiling,

but it looked like she was just committing to being happy. It looked like she was sort of doing a freeze frame goodbye, like in a sitcom. Right, which Ben is now doing. The other thing that I was sort of like, like watching this movie i'm like damn this is a dense movie there's all kinds of stuff going on and then what i often do when we're doing the show is i have like the wikipedia page open so i can just have the plot summary up

and like plot wise it's a very there's no there's not actually a lot going on in the movie you know what i mean like it's all antics but like it's all antics, but like, it's pretty simple. Like, like you said, like, it's like that this and then that and then they fix it. You know, like it's it's it's it's all it's all pretty surfacy, which maybe is my problem with it, but is also kind of the point. I don't know. I think this is a weird movie. That's what I like about it. And to you saying, David, like, is there a better version of Back to the Future 3 that could exist i feel like this is the best possible back to the future that could ever exist i feel like this movie has all of the smartest uh and sort of sequel yes right yeah okay you said back to the future you just said

it's the best back to the future i think i said I think I said two. Oh, I might have maybe dropped that one. I might have swallowed it. I don't know. Zoom sucks. But, yeah. What if, hmm. Right? Because I just. I was about to say, what if this was three? But maybe not.

Like, maybe you need to do, like I said, you need to do all the wild stuff first. Yeah. Yeah. And the other point is, I mean, like, I was watching the making of stuff, and Spielberg keeps on saying, like, we were following in the Star Wars model. Like, the second one is the dark one. We wanted to make the one where everything went wrong. Yes, that's fair.

And it ends on a cliffhanger that is ostensibly scary, right? Like, Doc is gone. And then it's also the first movie to end with the trailer for the next movie ever which is a bold decision at the time it does kind of suck a little bit of the power of the ending away yes you know what i mean like it's like it's kind of better to leave marty on that truly like fuck what's gonna happen and then instead it's like anyway soon they're gonna be in the wild west yeehaw and you're like well okay i guess they're gonna go to the fucking wild west then i guess that's what's gonna happen yeah they talked about they were like worried that audiences

would revolt if the movie ended on such a down note so they wanted to give them a guarantee that the third one was in fact happening like it was more just to show like look we have footage i swear to god the movie is like a given but right right it's kind of a thing where i almost wish they cut it out for like home video releases like it just cut to credits now yeah right you just get rid of that right the stickler for like show it to me the way it was in theater yeah you gotta keep it it's a weird little artifact that they did that ben before we wrap up like wrap up wrap up you didn't get to talk much because you know nicole had a hard out we wanted to get you know nicole talking but you do you do you have any takes on this way i just feel like the the hoverboards the the the clothes the fashion the clothes i mean that's what i wanted

to jump in on i think that yeah this is so 90s like that's what we were talking about too the colors like the projection of that but the gang right because think about in the first movie like a thing i wrote down right in my little congratulations idea notebook is i want to get customized 3d glasses because i think that fucking rules is just an accessory to just wear right because one of biff's henchmen wears that character's name no the henchman who wears the 3d glasses what is it 3d hell yeah that's good but um yeah i brought up the helmet their fucking look is it's so fucking good so good and yeah i think even just down to like i think a little thing that i always remembered is um griff's one metal knee pad. Yes.

Like just little shit like that. It's like Lost Boys. Yeah. Meets like Blade Runner. Right. Like it's just such a great amalgamation of all this stuff, but then it's still a kid's like movie, right? So it's not like sharp and like edgy.

I love it. Can I give you the names of the gang yeah of the future gang please data spike and whitey did you have a friend called spike ben because i feel like you should have in uh no because that feels too on the nose you know what i mean that's what i like about it i had a friend named spike i lived with a guy named spike i was the spike friend i have a different friend named spike now that's right and lousy with spike wait you have wait you have two spikes in your life you know what in fact i arguably have three one of my best friends in high school who i later lived with when we both dropped out of college was

named spike right i have a friend who now goes by spike and then my best friend in college for the brief time i was there before dropping out uh was a guy who was known as spike and when my best friend in college for the brief time i was there before dropping out uh was a guy who was known as spike and when he went to college he was like i'm gonna shake up my brand and change my name so i knew him as nick and then i've stayed in touch with him over the years and when i hang out with him and his friends they all call him spike wow like i knew him in the one period when he kind of wasn't spike it's weird that he was like i have to rebrand i can't be this cool anymore i can't be spike anymore i'm just gonna be nick i'll be regular to wear like a spiked bracelet and so i'm gonna call him spike and

he's like i don't want to be the bracelet guy anymore and i think he didn't realize oh i can still be named spike and not wear the bracelet it's just right, right, Ben, I mean, I know it's not quite Vaporwave because we're not quite at, like, the mid-90s Encarta vibes that are sort of the base of Vaporwave. But still, just, like, the hologram of the shark biting Marty, like, all that stuff. Yep. No, absolutely.

And for how much they got right, like, in their future predictions, like, they say, like, 50% of it we got right, 50% of it we got wrong. Stuff like how quickly 80s nostalgia was going to come into play. Like Cafe 80s looks like just a pop-up that someone would have. But there's shit like there's the Surf Vietnam poster in the back alley, which they were just like, this is ridiculous. There's no chance Vietnam is ever going to become a tourist attraction. They nailed that.

Like the gas prices, the thing with like watching like eight different screens at once and the kid wearing the headset at the dinner table. The joke that the Cubs are in the World Series, which everyone was like, ha ha ha. And you know, they famously never make it. They did win, I believe the year after, I think they in the World Series, which everyone was like, ha ha ha. And, you know, they famously never make it. They did win, I believe, the year after.

I think they won the World Series 2016. Yeah. And that there's a Miami team, which at the time was not true, but now there is one. All that stuff's fun. It's making me think that really, like this first movie and the second movie

are really the only times where you can make these kinds of projections and jokes because you can't do that now. No, no, no. It would just be climate change. It would just be climate change. Yeah. And that shit. Right.

Visit flood land. Like truly. That's what I read some interview with Christopher Lloyd where he they were like, should you know, I assume like as he gets a ass all the time, we're time, would you want to make a Back to the Future 4? And he's like, yeah, if it's about climate change. I don't really know how else you do that. I feel like he's shot new stuff as Doc Brown about climate change that they've put on the internet or put on the re-releases and stuff like that. But yeah, it seems like that's the only thing he wants to talk about.

Good for him. Christopher Lloyd's a legend. It is interesting for how much technology stuff they got right. The fashion stuff, they were totally kind of off point for the 2000s, but then on point for the early 90s. Like everyone just took a lot of these aesthetics and started manufacturing them in 1992. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of that's i feel like that's often true these future movies you really are just predicting five years in it in the future right in terms of clothes marty's shoes look like air jordans like from like the mid 90s

100 right oh you want the other merch spotlight is like they've produced those shoes a couple times in like crazy limited runs that they do for Michael J. Fox's charity to raise money and they go for like tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars just insane shit but Nike does have the patent on self-lacing shoes like they have filed that patent they have it they have not released it I feel like they at some point were like showed off some early prototype that didn't totally do it but it's actively a thing that they've been working on since this movie because they want to be the ones to do it since this movie gave them the glory of that creation right um pepsi did like in 2015

they released the bottle that looked kind of like the bottle in this movie like all the companies that are used in this movie kind of embraced it but i want to say ben you mentioned the spiky boot the one boot that griff has that's also like becomes the biggest design aesthetic of like 90s comic books david like that becomes like jim lee rob liffield todd mcfarland the character has one oversized boot absolutely you're you're not wrong and then the other foot's kind of normal yeah you're you're totally right i just feel like people people come from this movie all the time they do and i think it rules and i love it i'm glad you love it i like your take i there's just always going to be something for me with this movie where i'm like more enjoying it than i'm loving it. But I don't know.

Maybe there's just something wrong with me. I don't know. Maybe. Go ahead. Sorry. I mean, there's definitely something wrong with you. I don't know why you keep on arguing about those extra two inches. But for me as a kid, I preferred this one,

which is objectively the wrong opinion. But I think I just got so excited by the wildness of it. I think that is a classic kid opinion though where you're just like this rules you know what i mean like you're just like this is so much fun right yeah it's bigger um yeah can i say though especially now that nicole's gone because i just think she would have no interest in this conversation what's the movie that is most indebted to back to the future 2 specifically. Avengers Endgame. Avengers Endgame is so Back to the Future 2. 100%.

It's just like watching this again, not having seen it in a while. It is wild how the structure is almost the same of like, you know, you create the future that's worse than you ever could have imagined. And the only way to fix it is to go back into the previous movie and relive your greatest hits it's so funny because avengers in game makes it clear it's like but you know back to the future is not how this stuff actually works but it is basically the same context like basically the same like idea of a movie, let's go back and look at the greatest hits and sort of have fun dodging around with them, which is fine. Totally. I was clowning on the Russo Brothers Pizza Film School in our I Want to Hold Your Hand episode. And then I believe literally the next day they posted an episode with Bob Gale that's actually really good and worth watching.

And it's Marcus and McFeely, the two Russos, and Gale. And they just get into a lot of the storytelling principles that gail and zemeckis had at the time and how like the russos and marcus and mcfeely are trying to like math it and like talk about like but you have to do this by page 16 and this and that and gail's just like i don't know we just did stuff because we thought it was fun but like these are the rules right we hold ourselves to in terms of character integrity in terms of fulfilling promises to the audience not the same sort of like structure mechanics shit um but it's so clear how much they were beholden to these movies and then also that they were like we had to explicitly write in a character saying it doesn't work like back to the future because

back to the future becomes the thing that everyone thinks of in terms of like cause and effect with time travel. Right. Right. Right. Um, and that's, that's fine.

Uh, I get it. Like that's, I, you know, I feel like I stuck up for the Russo brothers when you were clowning on them. Then I,

someone posted the intro to their thing and I was like, Oh, this looks like the worst it's really hard and then now you're saying like yeah but you know and so now i'm like all right i'll give them a shot right like i'll like i like a great many things about those guys there are a lot of things that are very easy to clown on with and and that intro is definitely that's exactly top of the list right uh but i recommend that people watch the back to the future episode of pizza film school i recommend that people watch all 26 episodes of back to the future the animated series

available now on used dvd it's essential it is an essential is it watch is it essential essential david stop your stop your the wire rewatch and watch back to the future the animated series i'm not re-watching the wire i good thought about re-watching the wire because um it's whatever you know the sort of time we're all like re-watching shit right now right like that's sort of like um but uh my uh forky is a teacher um in his spare time i don't know how to do the forky bit about this and the wires school series i think it's just gonna be too much yes it will be too much it's so it's so devastating that then why not go back in time and hang out with these friends um yeah you know what fine i mean jesus i mean you talked me into a griffin i'm gonna buy the back to i'm

not gonna do that i'm definitely not gonna look clara jules verne i remember watching i watched it when i was a kid much like i watched like the beetlejuice cartoon like a lot of those cartoons that were based on movies that I may not have even seen yet. Like, but I just sort of like soaked in the aesthetics by these like little Saturday morning cartoons first. I absolutely watched all of those cartoons before I saw any of those movies.

Yeah. Bill and Ted, Beetlejuice, Back to the Future. Yeah. The one I remember always is the strangest. I still remember to this day is the MC Hammer. Oh yeah.

Hammer Man. Or his friends and they talk to him. Right. What a fun. Yeah. That's a weird thing, I guess, that doesn't exist anymore, huh? Like where people could just shoehorn any concept into that time slot. I so badly want it to come back.

And it's one of my great disappointments that I think back, not Back to the Future, Fast and Furious Spy Racers, which is the Fast and Furious animated series that's on Netflix, is not that at all. Like, when they announced they're doing a Fast and Furious animated series, I was like, great. It's going to be the whole cast. They'll bring Paul Walker back from the dead with a sound alike, and they'll all be driving, like, robot cars. And instead, it's Dominic Toretto's nephew working for like a government agency griffin this is like one of the this you you are so annoyed about this so annoying right like yes you brought this up to me multiple times it's one of the four or five biggest issues plaguing our world today is back to the future why do i keep saying back to the Future? Fast and Furious,

Spy Racers. If you wanted to go on that, that the cartoon show is the thing that's been plaguing us the most and we'll end there. Because I want more, like this is,

this is what I want. I want like John Wick, the animated series. I want someone to do like a Saturday morning style John Wick series that functions like the Rambo cartoon series where John Wick has like a team of orphans who help him like defend the future.

Or they're all dogs. Right, right. And his guns are all like stun guns. There are no real bullets. Like I just love the weird bastardization of like movies that weren't totally meant for kids but then become very successful with kids. that weren't totally meant for kids, but then become very successful with kids. And then you make these odd cartoon adaptations where like Beetlejuice, the animated series

is about Beetlejuice and Lydia being best friends and Lydia just going into the ghost world to help Beetlejuice out with his problems and vice versa. Whereas in the movie, Beetlejuice is a man who tries to marry a 13 year old against her will. Yeah, he's less cool in the movie, I would say.

Right, right. They're like good buddies. And Back to the Future's about like Doc Brown's annoying kids and Uncle Marty having to clean up their messes. You know, Einstein driving the car and shit. Like, I just love this. I want all adult movies to have animated series again. It's all I ask for.

Make a Mad Max cartoon. I'd watch the hell out of it yeah about the guitar guy just him and his adventures or whatever yeah do doof warrior doof and sons right little doof i don't know whatever you want to doof and son doof and little doof uh well thank you folks all for listening next Next week, Back to the Future Part 3. We conclude our Back to the Future month. Yes, join us next week for Back to the Future 3, which we're going to record very soon.

Yes. And I'm excited for that, just because that's a silly, loosey-goosey movie. It's a silly, loosey-goosey movie. It's The Ultimate Gentleman 6, and it's certainly the one I've seen the least. So I'm excited to watch it again with fresh eyes. And, yeah, I don't know.

Bobby Zemeckis, we're still in the golden years for this guy. I know. Everything's going fine right now. I'll say, oh, that's the one final thing I wanted to say. Watching it now through this prism, you do start to see a lot of the things that start to plague Zemeckis come up in this movie. This feels like the first one where it's like, A, it feels like Zemeckis and Cundy nailed down this like super shiny Amblin-y look that I feel like is what all 90s like adventure films, family comedies, like blockbusters all kind of have this color palette this sort of bright shiny lighting

going forward where even in the nighttime scenes everyone's kind of cleanly lit right right uh whereas the first one has some some grit to it to the like i'm designing entire sequences around showing off new technological tricks i've developed that's what was occurring to me right where he's just like can we do this and they're like maybe right and you're like okay bobby you know like it's all in service of something insane yeah which is good in this because the movie's kind of just bananas anyway so who cares but it it's gonna be his achilles heel like like more and more. And the stuff is good. The tricks he pulls off are good this time. Like it's worthwhile and it's a lot of stuff that was new

and that changed the industry forever. He pioneered a lot, a lot of shit on this movie. But the final piece of it is Zemeckis' obsession with sort of being clever and being a step ahead of the audience. Spielberg says in some behind-the-scenes thing that he's like an ornery filmmaker and he wants to have like a struggle. He wants to feel like he's pushing against something. When I interviewed him, he was so fucking ornery. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but that's definitely his energy. But the more successful he becomes,

the more he's like, fuck you, I'm doing mocap Polar Express. Like he wants people to be doubting him every time and trying to out clever them. There's an amazing quote from him in a behind the scenes thing, though, where he goes like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I was like really frustrated when you're trying to come up with ideas for this movie because I don't really care about time travel. I don't really care about the future. I don't really care about aliens. Like the future and aliens, I think, are the two least interesting things you can make movies about because it's just you guessing you don't do anything you know you don't know what you're writing about you're just making shit up and then it's like seven years later he does contact he does another time travel movie you know yeah that's crazy yeah uh what a weird guy what a weird guy and we'll be talking about how weird he is for the next

uh four months. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, subscribe. Go to blankies.com. Blankies.reddit.com for some real nerdy shit. Blankies.com. Go to Shopify. Our Shopify page for merch.

We'll have new stuff coming soon. Go to patreon.com backslash or forward slash blank check. I always get corrected for that. Slash blank check for our special features. We're doing the Alien franchise, but also going to do an episode on Tales from the Crypt. The Zemeckis Gale episodes

of Tales from the Crypt. We have the Crypt Keeper himself as a guest. Yes. Spoiler. Sorry, guys. No, what's weird, we have the Crypt Keeper booked, but for what lies beneath.

That's the weird thing. Pick that one. He's an expert. He just likes it. Is the Crypt Keeper canceled? Is that possible? He sounds like someone who might get canceled. I'm sorry.

Crypt Keeper is an ultimate ally. He's a gentleman on set. He fights hard for the rights of his crew and his cast members. Yeah, please don't say that. The Crypt Keeper is like Hugh Jackman. He's like very supportive of everyone around him. I don't know why I went to Hugh Jackman. All right, we're done.

That's it. We're done. You have to do an end as always. That's all. Yeah, I mean, you're kind of, right. And when you say you got to do an end as always, it kind of puts a lot of pressure on my end as always because usually I'm just kind of like rolling into it.

And now you sort of circled it, put a spotlight on it. Well, a social media, Ange. I got to thank Ange. Lay Montgomery for our theme song. Joe Bone and Pat Rounds for our artwork, of course. And as always, David kind of screwed me with the end as always i don't know what to say i i would have done a great end as always but the pressure became too great and you folks just have to imagine what it would have been had david not

not burdened me with expectations it feels like like... I'm turning my Zoom off. You just keep going. It's my back to the future too. How could I ever live up to what people wanted it to be at this point?